Cultivating Plants

With a sigh, Josephine opened the door. Even though they were underground, the place was well-illuminated thanks to the many Myriad lights. Having light during the day in enclosed spaces would have been unthinkable as the light stations only worked during the night, but now with the Radiating Undergrowth, darkness had been erased even in the bowels of the earth.

"I must inform with solemnity and a heavy heart that the assassins are unto… us?" The former assassin's gaze diverted to the ground where a green mass was slithering. "What is she doing?"

"Shinobiyorutsurai?" The Prince of Flowers asked, his scarlet gaze focused on one of the laboratory's counters. "She gets bored from time to time, and she dissolves her shape when she's bored. In the Evergreen, it's more natural as she can camouflage herself as having vines on the canopies, but here… well, there's the ground and not much more."

"I see…" She responded calmly. "Have you heard what I have said beforehand, monsieur?"

"Oh, yeah, I have," he casually dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "I was already working under the assumption that we were in the gaze of the assassins, so that doesn't change anything."

"I do not know if to commend you for your foresight or admonish you for your paranoia."

"Paranoia is a healthy state of mind."

"Who taught you that?"

"Aloe, of course."

"It is… difficult to believe that a goddess can feel something as pressing and insidious as paranoia."

"I would say that it's precisely because she is a goddess that she feels it to that degree. It's why she's doing what she's doing, after all."

The more Josephine learned about the Prince of Flowers, the less she knew what to think of him. He had been sort of a mythological figure from her investigations, it was precisely because the snake-tongues talked so much about him that she found him in the first place. The whispers of his being had even reached Tecolata, which she had discovered on a journey she had made to the new world during the last decade. Some Tecolatans ached to know about their brethren who was halfway to godhood.

"What are you doing?" Josephine calmly approached him. The demigod sat crisscrossed on a stool and half-naked before a miniature parterre on top of the counter.

"I've been developing some theories on how Aloe has become… well, Aloe. Right now, I'm trying to recreate the miniature Blossomflames that are in hospitals."

"And why are you doing that?" As much as she tried, the former maid was unable to comprehend the divine arts of the druids as she had lacked any real education in her life. It didn't help that the Prince of Flowers refused to tell her about it, though it wasn't like he kept his displays hidden.

"To create dryads, of course," he casually stated.

"To what now?" Josephine directed him a tired gaze in utter confusion.

"Create dryads."

"Yes, I heard you, monsieur. I meant why."

"I already mentioned that I'm working on theories on how Aloe became Aloe, right?" She nodded. "And if I work through the stories she has personally told me and the history of the Evergreen, the first dryads appeared around a bit more than a century ago, give or take half a century, maybe. Cross-matching some events, I can tell that Aloe only gained her… gorgeousness by the same time dryads appeared, so her divine state has, somehow, also created the dryads."

"I see," the mature woman said deep in thought with a hand on her face. "So if you discovered how to create dryads yourself, you would be able to recreate Mother Nature's divineness."

"And then I would be her equal," he nodded. "Alas, I still have a bunch of work in front of me with the hybridization."

"I am afraid I am not familiar with that term, monsieur."

"It's a term used for cultivation, actual cultivation and not… you know," the Prince of Flowers explained as the dirt before him slightly trembled and a handful of sprouts emerged from it. "I'm not a botanist, but if I had to give a definition… it would be like reproducing plants?"

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"Like pollination?" The former maid asked in confusion.

"Not quite." By that point, the sprouts had grown into buds. "Pollination is a type of vegetable reproduction that some plants do, like flowers, but hybridization is not about the act of reproduction itself but the result."

"Right…" She nodded unsure of her words.

"Augh…" Xochipilli groaned. For some reason, his exasperation had a divine tinge to it. "I guess lack of sleep turns you unable to say things straight. In the simplest of ways, hybridization is crossing two plants and resulting in an offspring that inherits qualities of both."

"Oh…" Not only Josephine nodded in understanding, but also Shinobiyorutsurai. The dryad's unfurled vines quickly assembled into a human shape, not dissimilar to how bees would group up the entrance of a beehive in a shifting mass of many specimens.

"So that is what you were doing," the dryad added.

"I already explained to you that, Shinobiyorutsurai," the druid said with a frown.

"I cannot confirm that I have understood you until now, my liege."

He sighed at the vine dryad's words. "Whatever."

Whilst Josephine couldn't claim to have a solid grasp on vital arts, and especially vitality, the assassin did notice how the Prince of Flowers kept pumping vitality into the parterre before him at obscene rates. There was no other epithet to describe his actions, for many cultivators would have suffered from an aneurysm if they saw how many Haya were being dumped into the soil. But such actions weren't for no reason as the buds finally bloomed into flowers.

"Oh, this is an interesting result," Xochipilli muttered as a flower with a turquoise stem and petals with blue at the roots and bright at the tips lay before him.

From his cape, he took out a leaf that looked like a piece of old parchment and he rubbed it against the petals of the flower. Moved by arcane forces, the spots on the parchment started moving and assembled into letters. Josephine would have been surprised if it wasn't because such outlandish events kept happening on a daily basis.

The Prince of Flowers's visage twisted to a degree only possible with the might of the agility stance to accommodate his massive smile.

To understand what the druid was so excited about, Josephine walked behind him and read the words on the parchment over his shoulder.

Species: Flourishing Flame

Sobriquet: Firesource

Description: A member belonging to the Pyrofloresco family, their species is known for their ability to drown their enemies in flames and water.

Alignment: Chaos, Arcane

As interesting as the parchment the druid had used to identify the plant was, Josephine failed to understand why such words brought him that much glee.

"I have finally managed to combine the Flourishing Spring and the Blossomflame into a single plant, but I must say this is a downgrade," he whispered to himself, but the words still caught the mature woman's attention.

"What do you mean you have combined the Flourishing Spring and the Blossomflame?" Many bells rang in her mind as the two specimens of monster flora – or evolutions as the Prince of Flowers and his patron called them – were rather well-known.

"Exactly as it sounds," Xochipilli shrugged. "Haven't I just explained to you what hybridization was?"

"Well… I thought that…" Josephine's eyes looked away, unable to finish her sentence as a mild blush appeared on her visage.

"Oh! You thought I was using normal plants? Oh, no, no. This is the hybridization of evolved ones. This is precisely why I'm so hellbent on finding success. But alas," the Tecolatan shrugged, "this is rather disappointing."

"How so?" It was the dryad who spoke. "Isn't this what you wanted, my liege?"

"Not quite," he shook his head. "I have mixed both flowers successfully, yes, but you must take into account its effects. The most important characteristic of the Blossomflame isn't that it can burn people, but that it can heal them, and this… well, this hybrid doesn't portray that capability. Beyond having less vitality than its parents, which makes it weaker by default, it means it has lost the most valuable trait. In shorter words, the usefulness of this hybrid is infinitesimal compared to its grown parents."

"So why are you still smiling?" It was Josephine's turn to ask.

"As I've said to Shinobiyorutsurai: not quite," his grin intensified. "Yes, this hybrid in particular is useless, but that doesn't mean that others will be. And besides, there are lots of clues on the veritas' description alone that we can use for further analysis. The name and sobriquet are a mixture of both; the alignment speaks of Chaos and Arcane, even when both flowers had a Life alignment, which means that not only that has been lost, but as I have seen with other hybrids, the Chaos alignment always prevails and it's always first, that it's very interesting; but most importantly, the description states that it belongs to the Blossomflame family, and in my experience, that means it's not a new evolution."

Josephine had failed to understand most of what the druid had talked about, not only because she lacked a lot of knowledge on the subject, but also because he spoke hastily and without stopping to breathe, a clear effect of the regeneration stance that he was wielding, basically nullifying his need to breathe at his level.

"So what does that mean?" It was Shinobiyorutsurai who swallowed her pride and embarrassment and asked the question. Though Josephine doubted that the vine dryad could feel any of those emotions. Dryads behaved very differently from humans, and the mature woman could only observe raw and childish curiosity from her question.

"For starters, it means that Aloe has created this plant beforehand," Xochipilli said with a toothy grin and clear wording, enough so for Josephine to guess what that implied before he continued. "This means that we are in the right place. We are walking an already trekked path."

The Prince of Flowers jumped from his stool, performed a summersault mid-air, and landed behind the parterre on top of the counter.

"But most importantly," he flared his cape dramatically, "it means I have found the true way of cultivation."